The annual plan for Audiences is focused on Knowledge Equality, that is, growing new contributors and content. The Language-Team work will contribute to outcome 4, Local Language Content. Work areas and roadmap are described below.
Work areas
Content translation
Content Translation has been an effective tool to help create content in local languages. The planned improvements will make it a more reliable tool, easier to use for newcomers, and exposed to more users. In this way it is expected to increase the content created with it. More details on the initiatives and metrics below.
Initiatives:
- Version 2. A more solid translation editor based on VisualEditor editing surface.
- Guidance for newcomers. Help newcomers to overcome the common issues they find during translation, so that they can complete their translation successfully and produce quality content.
- Expand existing content. Allow to expand existing articles with translations. This allows to easily contribute new content to existing articles, not just creating new articles. The focus will be on allowing to expand existing article stubs.
- Graduation out of beta. Solving the major blockers reported and polishing the tool to make it available as default, at least in one wiki.
- Bookmarking of translations. Allow advanced translators to keep translations of their choice for later. This allows advanced users to better organise and keep opportunities to translate.
Key metrics (in order of priority):
- Better content produced. The number of articles translated by users that aren’t deleted in 30 days increases, with especial attention to new editors (T194650).
- More reliable tool. The success rate for users using the tool increases, with especial attention to new editors (T194647).
- More newcomers using the tool. The number of users using the tool increases, with especial attention to new editors (T194641), and retention improves after their first translation (T195949).
In addition to the key metrics, some operational metrics have been defined to measure the adoption of the new version of Content Translation (T196435) and the number/type of issues that translators experience with the tool (T194648).
Improve Translate extension & Translatewiki process
Language support tools are an important part of the infrastructure of Wikimedia products. Identifying what needs improvement, and acting on key maintenance tasks will improve the level of language support of different products. More details on the initiatives and metrics below.
Initiatives:
- Audit. Analysis of the language infrastructure products considering the frequent requests with highest impact ( based on the language wish list among others). As a result, prepare a maintenance (and expansion) plan.
- Translate Extension & translatewiki.net maintenance work. Key improvements on the translation infrastructure.
- i18n support maintenance. Key improvements on other language-related tools supported by the Language team.
Key metrics:
- Reduction in the backlog for language support tools.
- Specific interventions may have a specific metric depending on their focus.
Timeline
Q1: July - September Language-2018-July-September
Content translation:
- Complete Version 2:
- Guidance for newcomers:
- System for communicating errors and warnings (T189488) to support basic cases.
- Guidance for issues with templates (T192271)
- Machine translation abuse prevention with warnings (T190279), maintenance category (T190798) and blocking (T190283).
- Research to identify common issues by newcomers (T189475), and the effectiveness of our communications.
- Expose Version 2 as an opt-in feature (T194387), still as a beta feature.
Improve Translate extension & Translatewiki process:
- Audit. Plan the maintenance work to be done for the upcoming quarters.
Q2: October - December
Content Translation:
- Solve potential regressions based on feedback from users trying version 2.
- Improve the guidance for newcomers based on the research to identify common issues by newcomers.
- Advanced control on publishing content: publish settings (T133862), issues about changes in content (T168287), expired sessions (T192066).
- Introduce concepts to newcomers such as templates (T194149), auto-save (T106698), or the lack of MT (T106415),
- Make Version 2 the default (still as a beta feature). Version 1 still accessible, in case of need.
- Delete old drafts automatically after one year (T183890) to prevent crowding the database, problems editing outdated translations, and facilitate migration to version 2..
Improve Translate extension & Translatewiki process:
- Translate Extension & translatewiki.net maintenance work
Q3: January - March
Content Translation:
- Allow only version 2 for new translations. Version 1 only used for editing old translations started with such version.
- Graduate Content Translation out of beta for one wiki:
- Identify blockers for beta graduation with the community.
- Polish entry points (T192316). In preparation for graduating out of beta, we need to make entry points not to get in the way of non-translators who will be exposed to them once out of beta.
- Allow multiple users to translate the same article (T86151)
- Respond to feedback after the graduation out of beta.
Improve Translate extension & Translatewiki process:
- i18n support maintenance
Q4: April - June
Content translation:
- Expand existing content. Provide ways to expand existing articles by using translation (T114850) and invite to translate stubs (T88598).
- Bookmarking of translations. Allow to keep translations for later (T188634), display all bookmarked translations (T194476), and related improvements.
Improve Translate extension & Translatewiki process:
- Translate Extension & translatewiki.net maintenance work (continued)
- i18n support maintenance (continued)